TDF Stages Archive

By LAUREN KAY Modern dance icon Merce Cunningham was an innovator not only in angular shapes etched in otherwise flowing movement, but also in choreographic structure: Among other variables, he used chance to determine which sections of choreography were to be performed—and in what order— creating what was called an Event. As Cunningham’s right-hand man […]

Some demons are imaginary and some of them are real, and during a climactic moment in Little Children Dream of God, they all engulf the stage. Jeff Augustin’s play, now in Roundabout’s Underground series, follows a Haitian immigrant named Sula, who has floated to Miami on a car tire in search of a better life. […]

Susan Reiter covers dance for TDF Stages.

On the surface, Lucy Thurber’s new drama The Insurgents, now at the Labyrinth Theater Company, recalls her previous work. Like last year’s Obie-winning five-play cycle The Hill Town Plays, which chronicled the turbulent life of an author who (like the playwright herself) escaped an upbringing of poverty and strife in a small northeast town, The […]

Welcome toGeek Out/Freak Out, where theatre fans get super enthusiastic about things. This week, Mark Blankenship geeks out (via Google Doc), with Jennifer Ashley Tepper, who is both a musical theatre historian and a producer. Jennifer’s new book, The Untold Stories of Broadway: Volume 2, is an oral history of eight Broadway theatres, as told […]

By MARK BLANKENSHIP It’s no accident that The Groundling takes place in a guy’s garage. Marc Palmieri’s new comedy, now at Axis Theatre, follows Bob Malone, a landscaper who’s so moved by an outdoor performance of Love’s Labour’s Lost that he decides to write his own play about his marriage. He mostly casts his friends and […]

Anna Camp plays an artist in crisis in Verité — “This play is definitely keeping me up at night,” says Anna Camp, the star of Verité, Nick Jones’s unsettling new comedy at Lincoln Center’s Claire Tow Theater. Specifically, she’s unsettled by the decisions her character makes about balancing her family life with her career as […]

By KENNETH JONES Welcome to Building Character, our ongoing look at performers and how they create their roles It’s a wonder that actress Christina Bianco doesn’t struggle with nightmares about the dozens of characters she plays in Off-Broadway’s one-woman comedy Application Pending. You imagine that keeping all of them straight haunts her fevered mind. “This […]